Wei Ye Piao and Other Disguises of Misfortune
Mark Tursi

The mode of their craziness is different. When politicians go crazy, they want to force their ideas on others. Poets decline the honor. -Bei Dao

Murmuring direction and mourning
adjustment unraveled in such a majority of fragrance.
Your language, scraps of voice, and shuddering.
The majority of time is spent
buoying the terminable distance embattled and
throughout all this intuition a fable. Squadrons
of rotting tongues wrapped like moon
cakes all groans and no substance. Back away
from the glory, inside is really something.

Tap the lineage mangled eye instance asleep on galaxy
near the funnel not so black, but a whole
world of extinguished. Li Guangping,
mei jing, quo ye wei yu piao
(beautiful view, last night small rain floating)
avoiding all the rest but subtle hints
nudity and a lotus flower, passed behind the back,
the value of color in a "collection of couplets,"

the beauty of surfaces, reefs of light
a bric-a-brac of innumerableness, seeds of vowel,

and just think: it's all beneath the surface.
unlike your boldness

here so plain and so un-Chinese but thinking,
just the same about all this obscurity

as if our shadows sleepwalk while we rest dreaming of persimmons,
dragging with them, a piece of flesh, each time, a piece of us.